Archives for December 2012

This past Wednesday, my fiance and I began our holiday travels starting at his parents’ house. I’m naturally introverted and would rather stay home than go out. Visiting family is normally fine for this, but during the holidays things get a little crazy. Couple that with not sleeping in my normal bed, staying up late talking, and waking up early for family breakfasts, and I’m suddenly exhausted.

So today is Fake Christmas. I was woken up far too early for my preference so we could open presents together. It was delightful. But as I’m sitting on the couch, checking my email, I realize I’m falling asleep.

Now here’s a choice. Do I spend more time with my future in-laws because I truly enjoy their company or do I excuse myself and take some time to recuperate?

Thankfully, I chose the latter. I took a 45-minute nap. And you know what? When I woke up, I felt so much better. And I didn’t miss out on anything important. And now I’m ready to sit down for a nice Christmas dinner with the family and actually enjoy myself.

So this is a really great lesson I’ve learned that I hope you can benefit from too. When you’re getting worn out, you need to take the time for self-care. It never takes as long as you think and the benefit is astounding. In fact, if you just slip away quietly for a few minutes, during the holidays your family might not even notice you were missing. *wink*

When you start selling your art, really when you start any business, there’s this driving force in your mind that is always telling you to wait just a little longer before you take the next step.

You say to yourself, “My site doesn’t look good enough to link it in a magazine article yet.” So you don’t answer the media callout you saw for unique glass blowers, despite feeling well-suited for the article.

Or perhaps you say, “I haven’t really hit my stride as an artist, so I should wait a little while until I look for media opportunities.”

Or even outside the media world, you avoid most ways to advance your business because you think you’re just not ready.

Well the truth is: you aren’t ready. Nope, you are not ready for whatever big (or little) opportunity that has presented itself. But you’ll never be ready. There hasn’t been a single time in my business that I’ve thought, “Gosh, I am so prepared for this.” It doesn’t happen. And if it does, the opportunity will probably turn out to be a dud.

It just so happens that good things don’t come when you’re “ready”. They come when you decide to take action despite not being ready. And that means moving past any fears you have about your ability as an artist or as a business owner. Every amazing artist and every amazing entrepreneur started at square one, with no experience and little ability (if any). The only way to move past “no experience and little ability” is to take action and move forward, ready or not.

Action Step: Your job this coming week is to move forward on something you’ve been putting off. Stretch outside your comfort zone. Maybe you’ve been thinking about taking new product photos but you don’t know much about your camera or editing software? Well then schedule time in your week right now to play with your camera and test out different buttons in your photo editor until you learn what’s useful for you. Then go ahead and schedule time in next week’s calendar to actually take product shots and edit them.

Whatever you’ve been setting aside for when you’re “ready”, let’s get it crossed off your list. Time to take action. Feel free to report back here with your results or with problems you run into and I’ll walk you through a solution or celebrate your accomplishment with you.

I saw these gorgeous beaded gift tags on Design*Sponge yesterday and immediately thought they would make the cutest business cards! They would be great for an artist whose art doesn’t really work for a business card. Here’s a closeup:

I love how many different things you could do by stitching beads onto your cards. This is labor intensive, for sure. But it would be great for special uses like sending your portfolio to a major retailer for reproduction. I wouldn’t recommend trying to make all your cards like this. It wouldn’t be a very efficient use of your time!

Do things get a little crazy during the holidays for you? Maybe you get testy with the hubby or find yourself crying at least three times a week? That’s holiday overwhelm. But, my friend, there is a cure. You have to plan in advance and you have to be realistic.

First, consider taking a break from your business. You won’t make much money while you’re gone. But it’s actually not that hard to step away and return smoothly with no collateral damage.

If you’re not going to take a business vacation, then you need to start your holiday prep with a good, ol’ brain dump. Write down every task you’ve got to get done from today through about a week into the New Year. I like to use Asana to write my tasks down because I can easily make notes and subtasks, categorize, and later – schedule. But use what you’re comfortable with, even if it’s pen and paper. Take into account business things as well as family, travel, and gift- and event-related ones. You can add more later, but try to get every last task out of your head and onto the page.

Next, I want you to put the huge list aside and chill. We’re going to create a time-block template. During the holidays, every day is a little different, but you usually know how the day will look by the night before. So every night before bed, you’ll sketch out a quick idea of your day, roughly hour by hour.

A holiday time block on a Tuesday when you’re visiting family may look like:

Sleep in until 10
10-11 eat a late breakfast and visit with family
11-1 help Lisa shop for last-minute gifts
1-2 make and eat lunch
2-3 check email and social media
3-4 meeting with Julia
4-7 visit with family, help make dinner, eat
7-8 layout a banner for advertising on Papernstitch
8-9:30 workout and shower
9:30-12 relax, enjoy hot chocolate and a fire

But you’d start with just the bare bones:

Sleep in until 10
10-11 eat a late breakfast and visit with family
11-1 help Lisa shop for last-minute gifts
1-2
2-3
3-4 meeting with Julia
4-5
5-6
6-7 help make dinner, eat
7-8
8-9
9-10
10-11
11-12

So you start with a time template by hour, then you fill in the absolutely-scheduled things. And then you look through your list and pick the most important thing and put it into the day, the second most important and put it into the day, etc. While it sounds a little tedious, it actually only takes 5 minutes each night if you do it consistently and you’ve already brain dumped.

But before you start putting tasks in your templates, I want you to revisit the gigantic brain dump list.We need to organize it. You should make sure the style of organization works for you, but I suggest ordering in some manner by importance. You could just order the entire list. Or you may prefer to split things into categories like business, kids, presents, parties, etc. and then order by importance. If you do that, you can easily pick a task from each category and fill them into your day so that you’re making progress on all fronts. Or you can work on one category each day so you stay in the zone and can focus the few days before a party. Do what feels good to you and adjust along the way.

Now that things are ordered, you are to ignore the list until each night when you fill out the time template. If you’re using Asana, you can go ahead and roughly schedule things out by day. But you still need to use the time template each night to get a clear visual of the day ahead and to keep you on task during the day, never floundering for the right thing to do. Again, ONLY look at the list when you are filling out the time template, and try to only fill out one time template at a time. If you fill out more, you might find a task doesn’t get done because it takes longer than you thought or your day got derailed by an emergency, and then you’ll feel very overwhelmed when you’re trashing the other time templates and having to recreate them.

This is all about feeling in control of the tasks. You know when they’re going to get done and you’re giving them time slots to prove it. I swear this helps tame the mind-clutter and makes you more productive. But you have to relax and you can’t let yourself look at the huge brain dump list unless you’re filling out tomorrow’s time template.

The last thing you’ve got to do is relax. Yep, eat some chocolate, drink some wine, take a hot bath, read a book…. do whatever you have to do to chill out. Your holidays are taken care of, the tasks just haven’t been actually completed yet. But there’s no more worry that needs to be done here. So reward yourself for all the prep work and take some time to bring yourself down from the stress it undoubtedly brought on. And then proceed with the plan to turn your stressed-out holidays into Happy Holidays!

Planning on taking off some time during the holiday season? Great! You deserve it. But you also need to make sure your business is ready for a break. Here’s what you need to do:

Communicate: let your customers know when you’ll be gone. Start by posting on social media about the vacation you’re taking or how excited you are to see your family and take a break from orders. Then put an announcement up on your site that tells customers when you’ll be gone and when they can expect orders to ship. Don’t forget to update any automated messages to reflect your vacation times. And let your custom or personalized order customers know directly about their order.

Prioritize: first, don’t take on any new work. No custom orders and no new pieces. Make a list of crucial things that need to get done – orders that need to be shipped, social media or blog posts that need to be written and scheduled, pieces that need to be finished, etc. And then prioritize them so that the most important things get done first.

Automate: site visitors and customers during your holiday break still need the best service you can give. Anticipate their needs by answering Frequently Asked Questions somewhere easy to find on your website. Link to it from the front page and from the shopping cart if you can. Put your business email on an autoresponder that lets people know you’re on vacation and when you’ll get back to them. Don’t forget to link to your FAQ’s.

Tidy: there’s nothing worse than returning from a vacation to a cluttered, stressful mess. Make sure you take a half hour to tidy up your workspaces.

What else do you do before you take time off from your business? Let me know in the comments.